Poetry by Dana Henry Martin

      Vincent Parsons CC





I Married a Bitch,


he says, and it could kill me but doesn’t.
These aren’t the first four words
he’s folded into a grenade
and thrown near my hips, stomach.

I’m on the toilet. He’s standing
at my knees. It’s that old game
of you’re caught where can you go
now. I gotcha. He wants a fight.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing.
He’s mad mad, the kind of mad
that makes him think he’s dead
or empty. His brother’s dying.

My husband wants a disaster,
any little disaster to make
the pain stop so life can chug
like the chemical plant snaking

through the neighborhood
he grew up in, where his father
and brother live together.
Where they’re dying together,

the son faster than the father,
which isn’t right. It isn’t right.
Stage 4b, an everywhere cancer
that hid until three weeks ago.

Insurance won’t cover the chemo,
which he can’t have anyway
unless the edema subsides.
I can’t fucking sit down,

he tells my husband. My balls
are too big. Everything’s swollen.
The family drags him to the movies,
to lunch. He goes. He doesn’t want to.

My husband flies home, flies back,
full of detritus from pasts that glowed
emberlike, now char. Pasts like
the burned dead. Pasts like words

that burn when you need them to,
when nothing else curbs what you
can’t dare feel. But I can’t take it,
not today. I married an asshole,

I say. And I don’t not mean it.

​




Nocturnal


Snakes go nocturnal in the heat.
There’s a callus where your heart
used to be. Once, I dreamed
you were arrhythmic. I threw you
in the car to take you to the hospital.
I drove as fast as a great-horned owl
hunting voles but not as quiet.

Last week, an Arizona man and his dog
disappeared in his partner’s truck.
He left in the middle of the night.
Mental health crisis was plastered
beside photos of him on social media.
He’d changed his status to single
on Facebook. Relationship crisis, too,
I think, though I have no way of knowing
other than my own knowing.

One black night, I walked into wildlands.
It wasn’t really an attempt, but I didn’t
care if a cougar ate half my body
and buried half for later. That’s as far
as I’ve taken things, like eating recalled
spinach by the handful or missing 
my mammogram. Six Tylenol to taste
the other side before retching to life.

A search party found the truck.
The man and his dog were both dead.
Self-inflicted, according to social media,
referring to the man and not the dog.
Mental health crisis. Relationship crisis.
Living is hard. So is loving. So is being loved.

In the dream, I hit the brakes and feel
my feet on asphalt, then gravel, then sand.
I run until I have no legs, until I look
half buried, only there’s just half of me
left. The half that won’t go. The half
that clings. The half that still wants:
that serpent corseting the coarsened heart.






​Glass

                — for Kelly


Today I saw a starling try to fly
into a closed window as if it knew

the pane was a way out, not a way
through. You feel like that, too,

sometimes, as do I, traumas lining
our pockets and us wondering

at the weight we bear, our desire
to find a body of water deep

enough to cover us like a sheet
of glass. I’ve stood on that shore,

or should I say sore, open wound?
Maybe I should say wound, the verb,

as in how many years have we
wound and unwound like a thousand

pulsating variable stars, held each
trauma-stone to the light and tried

to feed it little snails, as if we could
nourish the pain away or nurture it

into something that might walk
beside us rather than having to be

carried or dragged? We are turning
rocks into sky, you and I, our feathers

oiled, our backs to the sun. We are song-
birds, too. Everyone seems to forget that.

​



Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, Cider Press Review, FRiGG, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Stirring, Willow Springs, and other literary journals. Martin’s poetry collections include the chapbooks Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press). Their chapbook No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press) is forthcoming.
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